George Orwell Essay - Critical Essays - eNotes.com George Orwell Essay - Critical Essays link Link Excepting Animal Farm, most critics view George Orwell’s fictions as aesthetically flawed creations, the work of a political thinker whose artistry was subordinate to his intensely didactic, partisan passions. This reaction to Orwell’s novels was generally promoted posthumously, since his fiction in the 1930’s was often ignored by the larger reading public and panned by those reviewers who did pick up one of his books. The early academic critics—up to the late 1960’s—were often Orwell’s personal friends or acquaintances, who tended to see his early novels as conventionally realistic and strongly autobiographical. Even his masterpieces, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, were viewed as formally undistinguished, however powerful their message. It was not until the second generation of critics began looking at Orwell’s fiction that a more balanced assessment was possible. Burmese Days Orwell’s first published novel, Burmese Days, concerns the life of John Flory, an English policeman in Burma during the early 1920’s. The plot is fairly straightforward.

After a lengthy introduction to Flory’s personality and daily life, Orwell dramatizes him as a man blemished with a physical stigma, a birthmark, and puzzled by moral dilemma—how to deal with the increasingly rebellious natives, to whom he is secretly sympathetic but against whom he must wield the club of imperialistic authority. In the middle of this dilemma, Elizabeth arrives, a young English woman who is fresh faced but decidedly a traditional “burra memsahib.” Flory attempts to win both her heart and mind—much to the dismay of his Burmese mistress, Ma Hla May—and succeeds in doing neither, even though he manages to half succeed in proposing marriage during an earthquake. With a mind too closed to anything not properly British, and a heart only to be won by someone very English, Elizabeth forgets Flory’s attentions with the arrival of Verrall, an English military policeman, who will in turn reject her after his billet is completed. A humble Flory waits for Elizabeth, and after Verrall has left takes her to church services, confident that he has outlasted his rival.

Unfortunately, Flory is humiliated by Ma Hla May, is repulsed yet again by Elizabeth, and, in a mood of despair, commits suicide, killing both his dog and himself. In such a world, Flory is emphatically not meant to be a sympathetic character, but rather a victim of the very political order he has sworn to uphold. In effect, Orwell has laid a trap for the unwary reader. Too close an identification with Flory, too intense a desire to have him succeed in marrying Elizabeth—an unholy alliance of imperialistic Englishwoman and revolutionary, thinking pariah—will prevent the reader from recognizing the irreconcilable contradictions inherent in the British presence in Burma. Coming Up for Air Orwell’s fourth published novel, Coming Up for Air, was written in Marrakesh, Morocco, shortly after the author had recovered from yet another bout with tubercular lesions of the lungs. Although the novel sold moderately well for the time (a first printing of two thousand copies and a second printing of one thousand), many critics were vaguely condescending toward the hero, George Bowling, a middle-class insurance salesman who longs for the golden country of the past while simultaneously dreading the horrors of a second world war, then only months away.

Many of the themes more fully developed in Nineteen Eighty-Four find their initial expression in Orwell’s last conventional novel, set before the outbreak of the devastation that the next six years would bring. Coming Up for Air is set in London during the late 1930’s; Orwell employs a first-personnarrative to describe the life of George Bowling, a middle-aged, middle-class salesman, whose first set of false teeth marks a major milestone in his life. Musing in front of a mirror while he prepares for work one morning, George’s mind wanders back to the past, the golden England of thirty years earlier when he was growing up. As he goes about his day, disgusted with all the evidence of modern life in front of him—the casual brutalities, the tasteless food, the bombers overhead—George forms a plan to return to Lower Binfield, his childhood home, and, by extension, the simple life he had once led.

Unfortunately, his return only confirms the all-pervasive slovenliness of the modern world: Lower Binfield has been swallowed by a sprawling suburb, his adolescent sweetheart has become a frowsy old married woman (she is all of two years older than he), and the fishing hole (once filled with huge finny dreams) has been emptied of water and filled with trash. Shocked and completely disenchanted, Bowling makes plans to get at least a relaxing few days from the trip when a bomber accidentally drops a bomb close by, killing and wounding several people. In thorough disgust, Bowling packs, leaves, and returns home to face his wife, who has somehow found out where he has gone, although his motives for going will be forever incomprehensible to her. A plot summary of the novel fails to do justice to the subtle tonal shifts and complicated psychological changes Orwell employs in presenting his portrait of the average man waiting for the Apocalypse. Orwell uses the ancient theme of the double (or doppelgänger) to illustrate the self-fragmentation of European man prior to the outbreak of the war.

George Bowling is divided into two “selves.” Tubby is the outwardly fat, insensitive insurance tout who is able to function successfully in a fast-paced, competitive world that would eat up less hardened personalities, but his character can survive only at the cost of any sort of satisfying inner life. Georgie, on the other hand, would be lost in the modern rat race and so is protected by Tubby; nevertheless, Georgie can give expression to the memories, the sensitivities, the love for natural pleasures that Tubby (and George Bowling) would have to forgo to remain functional. Thus, George Bowling devised a strategy for living both materially successfully and psychologically well in the modern world, doing so by splitting his identity into Tubby and Georgie. Coming Up for Air details the ongoing dialogue between these two “selves”—a conversation that reflects the strains of modern living as well as any other novelist has done in the twentieth century. Furthermore, Orwell has modified the literary conventions of the doppelgänger to suit his own needs. Whereas the death of one-half of the double usually means the destruction, ultimately, of both, Orwell has Tubby live on after Georgie is symbolically destroyed by the bombing plane.

The tonal change at this point, rather like the tonal change in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) with the death of Kid Sampson, shows the reader the world that Orwell envisioned between 1938 and 1939, one horrible enough to prevent total escape even by death. It is, however, typically Orwellian that however horrible human bondage can make the cultural world, nature, of which humankind is a part, has enough ebullient energy to wait out any social mess—a wait without immediate hope, without idols, but also without hopeless despair. George Bowling leaves Lower Binfield, returning to his scold of a wife, Hilda; to the everlasting round of bills, worries, war clouds on the horizon, and a death-in-life without Georgie—but, as the novel’s epigraph states, “He’s dead, but he won’t lie down.” Animal Farm Animal Farm is one of those rare books before which critics lay down their pens. As a self-contained “fairy story,” the book can be read and understood by children not old enough to pronounce most of the words in an average junior high school history text.

As a political satire, Animal Farm can be highly appreciated by those who actually lived through the terrible days of World War II. As an allegory concerned with the limitations and abuses of political power, the novel has been pored over eagerly by several generations of readers. ... George Orwell's Burmese Days was set in a town based on Katha, in northern Myanmar [Hereward Holland/Al Jazeera] By Hereward Holland Nibbling on finger-food at a low breakfast table in northern Myanmar, members of the Katha Township Development Committee sat and discussed the novel Burmese Days, George Orwell's caustic homage to the "dirty work of Empire". "I don't like the behaviour of the Burmese in the book. The way it shows Myanmar people," said Kyaw Swe, a baker, railing against one of the characters in the book, the scheming judge U Po Kyin. "The judge's character is most like the Myanmar character." It is no coincidence that Kyaw Swe and his colleagues are debating the once-banned semi-fictitious novel set in the 1920s.

As residents of the quiet riverside town of Katha, they are successors to the "Orientals" reviled in the book by Orwell, the British satirist who went on to write Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. The remote town, thinly disguised as Kyauktada in the book, is the real-life setting of Orwell's first novel, which is no kinder to the "natives" than to the bigoted, brandy-soaked empire-builders of the British Raj. Orwell said the town had "not changed greatly between the days of Marco Polo and 1910", when the British established a railway terminus. A century later, horse-drawn Hackney carriages can still be seen whisking people past the colonial prison, school, hospital, tin-roofed church and pagoda, which "rose from the trees like a slender spear tipped with gold". Once forbidden, now feted Eighty years after its original publication, Burmese Days is enjoying a revival thanks to its recent translation into Burmese. Astonishingly, it won a government award for literature last year.

Some of Orwell's depictions, particularly the fictitious magistrate U Po Kyin, are as apt today as they were when he served as a colonial policeman in Katha, Kyaw Swe said. In the book, U Po Kyin supplements his meagre salary by accepting bribes from both litigants, known euphemistically in Myanmar as taking "tea money". Indeed, Orwell's publishers considered the original text of Burmese Days to be too realistic and made him change the names of some characters to avoid accusations of libel. "There is a little bit of the 'tea-money' culture left. A government civil servant can't live on their earnings," Kyaw Swe said. His remarks ring true: Myanmar is ranked one of the 20 most corrupt countries in the world, according to Transparency International. The average annual income of a low-level civil servant was around 300,000 kyat (approximately $300) in 2010, according to the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. However, his comments are breathtaking given that such unguarded public criticism of government would have landed him in a cramped cell just three years ago.

He would have likely joined the hundreds of other political prisoners across the country, many of whom were brutally tortured. Once pulped now feted publication After decades of thuggish misrule by a string of secretive military juntas, things are beginning to change. A pack of retired generals took power in Myanmar in 2011 and began unravelling half a century of paranoid isolationism. Last year, the government released most political prisoners and dropped farcical censorship laws that epitomised "Orwellian" totalitarianism. Western governments have tentatively swapped diplomatic sticks for carrots. But the optimism is tempered by mounting religious violence, faltering peace talks with ethnic armed groups and the military's enduring stranglehold on parliament. Orwell said Katha had 'not changed greatly between the days of Marco Polo and 1910'. A century later, horse-drawn carriages can still be seen on the streets [Hereward Holland/Al Jazeera] Yet the government's shifting attitude towards Burmese Days is symbolic of its fledgling democratic ambitions. An early translation of the novel was pulped by Myanmar's socialist regime in the 1960s. For decades, photocopies of Orwell's works were traded in secret.

Now, translations feted by the Ministry of Information, the same institution that once banned them, are flying off the shelves. One of the larger bookstores in Yangon, Inwa Books, has run out of copies of Burmese Days. "It's very strange for it to be forbidden and now it wins awards," said Bo Maung, a member of civil society in Katha, reflecting on his favourite Orwell novel. As author Emma Larkin joked in her travelogue Finding Orwell in Burma, he did not pen only one novel about Burma, but wrote an unwitting and eerily prescient trilogy. Burmese Days exposed the brutality and racism of colonial rule. Animal Farm is an allegorical tale of a socialist revolution gone wrong, later mirrored by dictator Ne Win's disastrous "Burmese Way to Socialism" in the 1960s. And in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's sketch of a "horrifying and soulless dystopia paints a chillingly accurate picture of Burma", Larkin wrote of rule under the military government in 2004. Orwell pilgrims Myanmar flung open its doors to foreigners in 2011.

Since then, tens of thousands of sandal-shod tourists have arrived to marvel at thousand-year-old temples, picturesque lakes and the crumbling grandeur of colonial architecture. Few attempt the arduous 13-hour train or boat ride up-river from Mandalay. Those pilgrims who do are richly rewarded with colonial buildings that acted as the props for Orwell's fiction, like an abandoned theatre set. We are trying to democratise the state. There are many changes, but we have to wait some time and it will gradually improve. - Khin Maung Toe, chairman of the Township Development Committee Earlier this month, after several red herrings, amateur historian and Orwell fanatic Nyo Ko Naing identified what he believes to be the novelist's old residence. The two-story teak house sits on raised brick stilts across a dirt track from the tin-roofed St Paul's Church. A blue satellite dish protrudes from the dilapidated veranda of the house that now belongs to a police major. In the country's commercial capital, Yangon, foreign diplomats eulogise the reformers at the top of the government, but Nyo Ko Naing said little has changed at lower levels of the administration. "Their behaviour is old.

The new face of Myanmar is for the internationals," he claimed. "The government has changed, but there is no change." Immigration officer Kyaw Swe - who shares the same name as the baker - disagrees, pointing to the creation of the Township Development Committee sitting around the breakfast table. The group, comprised of government officials and three civil society organisations, allows the people to request services for the first time, says the immigration officer. "Before 2011, all the administration was top to bottom and now it's… inverted. It's based on what the people want," he said. The government has even said it will give historian Nyo Ko Naing and his friends money to convert a red-brick colonial mansion, formerly the district commissioner's house, into a museum celebrating the author. "We are trying to democratise the state," said Khin Maung Toe, chairman of the Township Development Committee. "There are many changes, but we have to wait some time and it will gradually improve." Source: Al Jazeera George Orwell - Biography and Works. Search Texts, Read Online. Discuss.

George Orwell Biography of George Orwell George Orwell [pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair] (1903-1950), journalist, political author and novelist wrote Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); ï¿½It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.ï¿½ Originally titled Last Man in Europe it was renamed Nineteen Eighty-Four for unknown reasons, possibly a mere reversal of the last two digits of the year it was written. It was first met with conflicting criticisms and acclaim; some reviewers disliked its dystopian satire of totalitarian regimes, nationalism, the class system, bureaucracy, and world leadersï¿½ power struggles, while others panned it as nihilistic prophesy on the downfall of humankind. Some still see it as anti-Catholic with Big Brother replacing God and church. From it the term Orwellian has evolved, in reference to an idea or action that is hostile to a free society.

Yet, Nineteen Eighty-Four has proven to be a profoundly meaningful work and continues to be one of the worldï¿½s most widely read and quoted novels into the twenty-first century. Inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin's (1884-1937) We, Blair worked intensely, often writing ten hours a day and even when bedridden with tuberculosis in his last days continued to labour over it. From his essay ï¿½Why I Writeï¿½; ï¿½First I spent five years in an unsuitable profession (the Indian Imperial Police, in Burma), and then I underwent poverty and the sense of failure. This increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes, and the job in Burma had given me some understanding of the nature of imperialism: but these experiences were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. Then came Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, etc.

By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.ï¿½ He goes on to say; ï¿½The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.ï¿½ Education and Early Years 1903-1921 Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal (now Bihar) India, into a family of the ï¿½lower-upper middle classï¿½ as he wryly puts it in The Road to Wigan Pier (1933). He was the son of Ida Mabel nï¿½e Limouzin (1875ï¿½1943) and Richard Walmesley Blair (1857ï¿½1938), who worked as a sub-deputy opium agent for the Indian Civil Service under the British Raj.

Eric rarely saw his father until he had retired in 1912. Ericï¿½s grandfather had been a wealthy plantation and slave owner but the fortunes dwindled by the time he was born. He had two sisters, Marjorie and Avril. At the age of one Eric and his mother settled in England; his father joined them in 1912. At the age of five, Blair entered the Anglican parish school of Henley-on-Thames which he attended for two years before entering the prestigious St. Cyprianï¿½s school in Sussex. Corporal punishment was common in the day and possibly a source of his initial resentment towards authority. While there, Blair wrote his first published work, the poem ï¿½Awake! Young Men of Englandï¿½; ï¿½Oh!

think of the War Lordï¿½s mailed fist, That is striking at England today.ï¿½ With pressures to excel, Eric earned a scholarship to ï¿½the most costly and snobbish of the English Public Schoolsï¿½ Eton College where he attended between 1917 and 1921, and where Aldous Huxley , author of Brave New World (1932) taught him French. Indian Civil Service 1922-1927 Following in his fatherï¿½s footsteps, Blair went to Burma (now Myanmar) to join the Indian Imperial Police, much like author H. H. Munro or ï¿½Sakiï¿½ had done in 1893. During the next five years he grew to love the Burmese and resent the oppression of imperialism and decided to become a writer instead.

Works he wrote influenced by this period of his life are his essay ï¿½A Hangingï¿½ (1931); ï¿½It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man.ï¿½ and ï¿½Shooting an Elephantï¿½ (1936); ï¿½It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant ï¿½ it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery.ï¿½. His novel Burmese Days was first published in the United States in 1934 and then London in 1935, also based on his days in service. Paris and London 1928-1936 After Orwell resigned, he moved to Paris to try his hand at short stories, writing freelance for various periodicals though he ended up destroying them because nobody would publish them. He had to resort to menial jobs including one at the pseudononymous ï¿½Hotel Xï¿½ that barely provided him enough to eat as a plongeur; ï¿½[A] plongeur is one of the slaves of the modern world.

Not that there is any need to whine over him, for he is better off than many manual workers, but still, he is no freer than if he were bought and sold. His work is servile and without art; he is paid just enough to keep him alive; his only holiday is the sack... trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them.ï¿½ ï¿½Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) After a bout of pneumonia in 1929 Blair moved back to England to live in East London and adopted his pseudonym George Orwell, partly to avoid embarrassing his family. Down and Out in Paris and London, similarly to Emile Zola ï¿½s The Fat and the Thin (1873) famously exposes the seedy underbelly of Paris and accounts his days of living hand to mouth; ï¿½At present I do not feel that I have seen more than the fringe of poverty.

Still I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning.ï¿½ A proponent for socialism, Blair now wanted to write for the ï¿½common manï¿½ and purposefully lived as a tramp in London and the Home Counties and stayed with miners in the north. Blair learned of the disparity between the classes and came to know a life of poverty and hardship amongst beggars and thieves. His study of the under-classes in general would provide the theme for many of his works to follow. We read of his ï¿½urban ridesï¿½ and experience with the unemployed in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), written for the Left Book Club. In 1932 Blair was a teacher for a time before moving to Hampstead, London to work in a bookstore.

In the sardonically comical Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) Gordon Comstock spurns the ï¿½Money Godï¿½, materialism, and status, though that which he hates becomes an obsession. Comstockï¿½s political creed soon proves a cover-up for deep seated emotional issues; ï¿½The money clinked in his trouser pocket as he got up. He knew the precise sum that was there. Fivepence halfpennyï¿½twopence halfpenny and a Joey. He paused, took out the miserable little threepenny-bit, and looked at it. Beastly, useless thing! And bloody fool to have taken it! It had happened yesterday, when he was buying cigarettes. ï¿½Don't mind a threepenny-bit, do you, sir?ï¿½ the little bitch of a shop-girl had chirped. And of course he had let her give it him. ï¿½Oh no, not at all!ï¿½ he had saidï¿½fool, bloody fool!ï¿½ In 1936 Blair and once student of J.R.R.

Tolkien student Eileen O'Shaughnessy (1905-1945) married. In 1944 they would adopt a son, Richard Horatio. Based on his teaching days, A Clergymanï¿½s Daughter was published in 1935. Spanish Civil War When civil war broke out, Blair and his wife both wanted to fight for the Spanish government against Francisco Francoï¿½s Nationalist uprising. While on the front at Huesca in Aragon Blair was shot in the throat by ï¿½a Fascist sniperï¿½. In Barcelona he joined the anti-Stalinist Spanish Trotskyist ï¿½Partido Obrero de Unificaciï¿½n Marxistaï¿½ or POUM, the Workersï¿½ Party of Marxist Unification. When the communists partly gained control and tried to purge the POUM, many of Blair's friends were arrested, shot, or disappeared. He and Eileen barely escaped with their lives in 1937. His autobiographical Homage to Catalonia is written in the first person, mere months after the events.

ï¿½Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not laterï¿½some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.ï¿½ï¿½from his essay ï¿½Looking Back on the Spanish Warï¿½ WW II, the Home War Effort, and Fame 1939-1950 Back in England, Blair set to freelance writing again for such publications as New English Weekly, The Tribune and New Statesman. His essay subjects include fellow authors Charles Dickens , William Butler Yeats , Arthur Koestler, and P.G. Wodehouse.

Essay titles include ï¿½Inside the Whaleï¿½ (1940), ï¿½The Lion and The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Geniusï¿½ (1941), ï¿½Notes on Nationalismï¿½ (1945), ï¿½How the Poor Dieï¿½ (1946), and ï¿½Reflections on Gandhiï¿½ (1949). Coming Up For Air was published in 1939. Blair joined the Home Guards and also worked in broadcasting with the BBC in propaganda efforts to garner support from Indians and East Asians. He was also literary editor for the left wing The Tribune, writing his column ï¿½As I Pleaseï¿½ until 1945, the same year he became a war correspondent for The Observer. Eileen Oï¿½Shaughnessy died on 29 March 1945 while undergoing surgery in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1946 Blair lived for a year at Barnhill on the Isle of Jura. For years he had been developing his favourite novel that would cinch his literary legacy, Animal Farm (1944).

ï¿½On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood.ï¿½ Publishers did not want to touch his anti-Stalinist allegory while war was still raging so it was held for publishing until after the war had ended. From Chapter One of Animal Farm; ï¿½Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished for ever. Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.ï¿½ Back in England, in 1949 Blair was admitted to the Cotswolds Sanitorium, Gloucestershire for tuberculosis, the same year he married Sonia Bronwell (1918-1980).

Eric Arthur Blair died suddenly in London on 21 January 1950 at the age of forty-six, succumbing to the tuberculosis that had plagued him for the last three years of his life. He lies buried in the All Saintï¿½s Churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, England. George Orwellï¿½s life and works have been the source of inspiration for many other authorsï¿½ works. Keep The Aspidistra Flying, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four have inspired numerous television and film adaptations. He has also contributed numerous concepts, words, and phrases to present day language including Newspeak; doublethink ï¿½the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in oneï¿½s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of themï¿½; thoughtcrime; four legs good, two legs bad; all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others; He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past; and War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Among the ranks of other such acclaimed literary giants as Jonathan Swift and Aldous Huxley , George Orwell is a master of wit and satire, critically observing the politics of his time and prophetically envisioning the future. He devoted much of his life to various causes critical of capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and Stalinism, but in the end what he ï¿½most wanted to do is to make political writing into an art.ï¿½ ï¿½Liberty is telling people what they do not want to hear.ï¿½ï¿½from a preface to Animal Farm Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2006. All Rights Reserved. The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission.

Forum Discussions on George Orwell Recent Forum Posts on George Orwell George Orwell | British author | Britannica.com British author Alternative Title: Eric Arthur Blair George Orwell Virginia Woolf George Orwell, pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (born June 25, 1903, Motihari , Bengal, India —died January 21, 1950, London , England ), English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), the latter a profound anti- utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule. George Orwell. BBC Copyright Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell never entirely abandoned his original name, but his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London , appeared in 1933 as the work of George Orwell (the surname he derived from the beautiful River Orwell in East Anglia). In time his nom de plume became so closely attached to him that few people but relatives knew his real name was Blair. The change in name corresponded to a profound shift in Orwell’s lifestyle, in which he changed from a pillar of the British imperial establishment into a literary and political rebel.

Early life He was born in Bengal, into the class of sahibs. His father was a minor British official in the Indian civil service; his mother, of French extraction, was the daughter of an unsuccessful teak merchant in Burma (Myanmar). Their attitudes were those of the “landless gentry,” as Orwell later called lower-middle-class people whose pretensions to social status had little relation to their income. Orwell was thus brought up in an atmosphere of impoverished snobbery. After returning with his parents to England, he was sent in 1911 to a preparatory boarding school on the Sussex coast, where he was distinguished among the other boys by his poverty and his intellectual brilliance. He grew up a morose, withdrawn, eccentric boy, and he was later to tell of the miseries of those years in his posthumously published autobiographical essay , Such, Such Were the Joys (1953). Orwell won scholarships to two of England’s leading schools, Winchester and Eton, and chose the latter. He stayed from 1917 to 1921.

Aldous Huxley was one of his masters, and it was at Eton that he published his first writing in college periodicals. Instead of accepting a scholarship to a university, Orwell decided to follow family tradition and, in 1922, went to Burma as assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police. He served in a number of country stations and at first appeared to be a model imperial servant. Yet from boyhood he had wanted to become a writer, and when he realized how much against their will the Burmese were ruled by the British, he felt increasingly ashamed of his role as a colonial police officer. Later he was to recount his experiences and his reactions to imperial rule in his novel Burmese Days and in two brilliant autobiographical sketches, “ Shooting an Elephant” and “ A Hanging,” classics of expository prose. Against imperialism Scientists Ponder Menopause in Killer Whales In 1927 Orwell, on leave to England, decided not to return to Burma, and on January 1, 1928, he took the decisive step of resigning from the imperial police.

Already in the autumn of 1927 he had started on a course of action that was to shape his character as a writer. Having felt guilty that the barriers of race and caste had prevented his mingling with the Burmese, he thought he could expiate some of his guilt by immersing himself in the life of the poor and outcast people of Europe. Donning ragged clothes, he went into the East End of London to live in cheap lodging houses among labourers and beggars; he spent a period in the slums of Paris and worked as a dishwasher in French hotels and restaurants; he tramped the roads of England with professional vagrants and joined the people of the London slums in their annual exodus to work in the Kentish hopfields. British Culture and Politics Those experiences gave Orwell the material for Down and Out in Paris and London, in which actual incidents are rearranged into something like fiction. The book’s publication in 1933 earned him some initial literary recognition.

Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days (1934), established the pattern of his subsequent fiction in its portrayal of a sensitive, conscientious , and emotionally isolated individual who is at odds with an oppressive or dishonest social environment . The main character of Burmese Days is a minor administrator who seeks to escape from the dreary and narrow-minded chauvinism of his fellow British colonialists in Burma. His sympathies for the Burmese, however, end in an unforeseen personal tragedy. The protagonist of Orwell’s next novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), is an unhappy spinster who achieves a brief and accidental liberation in her experiences among some agricultural labourers. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) is about a literarily inclined bookseller’s assistant who despises the empty commercialism and materialism of middle-class life but who in the end is reconciled to bourgeois prosperity by his forced marriage to the girl he loves. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies Orwell’s revulsion against imperialism led not only to his personal rejection of the bourgeois lifestyle but to a political reorientation as well.

Immediately after returning from Burma he called himself an anarchist and continued to do so for several years; during the 1930s, however, he began to consider himself a socialist , though he was too libertarian in his thinking ever to take the further step—so common in the period—of declaring himself a communist . From The Road to Wigan Pier to World War II Orwell’s first socialist book was an original and unorthodox political treatise entitled The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). It begins by describing his experiences when he went to live among the destitute and unemployed miners of northern England, sharing and observing their lives; it ends in a series of sharp criticisms of existing socialist movements. It combines mordant reporting with a tone of generous anger that was to characterize Orwell’s subsequent writing. By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was in print, Orwell was in Spain; he went to report on the Civil War there and stayed to join the Republican militia, serving on the Aragon and Teruel fronts and rising to the rank of second lieutenant. He was seriously wounded at Teruel, with damage to his throat permanently affecting his voice and endowing his speech with a strange, compelling quietness.

Later, in May 1937, after having fought in Barcelona against communists who were trying to suppress their political opponents, he was forced to flee Spain in fear of his life. The experience left him with a lifelong dread of communism, first expressed in the vivid account of his Spanish experiences, Homage to Catalonia (1938), which many consider one of his best books. Returning to England, Orwell showed a paradoxically conservative strain in writing Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he uses the nostalgic recollections of a middle-aged man to examine the decency of a past England and express his fears about a future threatened by war and fascism. When World War II did come, Orwell was rejected for military service, and instead he headed the Indian service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He left the BBC in 1943 and became literary editor of the Tribune, a left-wing socialist paper associated with the British Labour leader Aneurin Bevan .

At this period Orwell was a prolific journalist, writing many newspaper articles and reviews, together with serious criticism , like his classic essays on Charles Dickens and on boys’ weeklies and a number of books about England (notably The Lion and the Unicorn , 1941) that combined patriotic sentiment with the advocacy of a libertarian , decentralist socialism very much unlike that practiced by the British Labour Party . Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest In 1944 Orwell finished Animal Farm , a political fable based on the story of the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Joseph Stalin . In the book a group of barnyard animals overthrow and chase off their exploitative human masters and set up an egalitarian society of their own. Eventually the animals’ intelligent and power-loving leaders, the pigs, subvert the revolution and form a dictatorship whose bondage is even more oppressive and heartless than that of their former human masters. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”) At first Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher for the small masterpiece, but when it appeared in 1945, Animal Farm made him famous and, for the first time, prosperous.

Dust jacket for the first American edition (1946) of George Orwell’s Animal … Advertising Archive/Courtesy Everett Collection Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written. It has, however, been overshadowed by his last book, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), a novel he wrote as a warning after years of brooding on the twin menaces of Nazism and Stalinism . The novel is set in an imaginary future in which the world is dominated by three perpetually warring totalitarian police states. The book’s hero, the Englishman Winston Smith , is a minor party functionary in one of those states. His longing for truth and decency leads him to secretly rebel against the government, which perpetuates its rule by systematically distorting the truth and continuously rewriting history to suit its own purposes. Smith has a love affair with a like-minded woman, but then they are both arrested by the Thought Police.

The ensuing imprisonment, torture, and reeducation of Smith are intended not merely to break him physically or make him submit but to root out his independent mental existence and his spiritual dignity until he can love only the figure he previously most hated: the apparent leader of the party, Big Brother . Smith’s surrender to the monstrous brainwashing techniques of his jailers is tragic enough, but the novel gains much of its power from the comprehensive rigour with which it extends the premises of totalitarianism to their logical end: the love of power and domination over others has acquired its perfected expression in the perpetual surveillance and omnipresent dishonesty of an unassailable and irresistible police state under whose rule every human virtue is slowly being suborned and extinguished. Orwell’s warning of the potential dangers of totalitarianism made a deep impression on his contemporaries and upon subsequent readers, and the book’s title and many of its coined words and phrases (“Big Brother is watching you,” “ newspeak ,” “doublethink”) became bywords for modern political abuses.

Trending Topics George Orwell Biography - life, family, parents, name, story, wife, school, mother, book George Orwell Biography London, England English writer, novelist, and essayist The English novelist and essayist, George Orwell, is best known for his satirical (using wit or sarcasm to point out and devalue sin or silliness) novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. Early years George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, Bengal, India, to Richard and Ida Mabel Blair. He had an older sister and a younger sister. His father was a minor customs official in the Indian Civil Service. When Orwell was four years old, his family returned to England, where they settled at Henley, a village near London, England. His father soon returned to India. As a child, Orwell was shy and lacked self-confidence. He suffered from bronchitis all his life.

He spent long hours reading and was especially interested in science fiction, ghost stories, William Shakespeare's (1564–1616) plays, and fiction by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Charles Dickens (1812–1870), and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). When Orwell was eight years old, he was sent to a private preparatory school in Sussex, England. He later claimed that his experiences there determined his views on the English class system. From there he went by scholarship to two private secondary schools: Wellington for one term and Eton for four and a half years. Orwell then joined the Indian Imperial Police, receiving his training in Burma, where he served from 1922 to 1927. While home on leave in England, Orwell made the important decision not to return to Burma, but to pursue writing. His resignation from the Indian Imperial Police became effective on January 1, 1928. Later evidence suggests that he had come to understand the imperialism for which he was serving, and had rejected it.

Imperialism is a political and economic practice whereby a nation increases its power by gaining control or ownership of other territories. Establishment as a writer Shortly after making this decision Orwell stayed in Notting Hill, a poor section in London's East End, and in a working-class district of Paris, France. He wrote two novels, both lost, during his stay in Paris, and he published a few articles in French and English. After working as a kitchen porter and dishwasher, and suffering from pneumonia (a lung disease), he returned to his parents' house in Suffolk, England, toward the end of 1929. Back in England, Orwell earned his living by teaching and by writing occasional articles, while he completed several versions of his first book, Down and Out in London and Paris. This novel recorded his experiences in the East End and in Paris. Because he was earning his living as a teacher when his novel was scheduled for publication, he preferred to publish it under a pseudonym (a made-up name used by an author to disguise his or her true identity). From a list of four possible names submitted to his publisher, he chose "George Orwell." First novels Orwell's Down and Out was issued in 1933.

During the next three years he supported himself by teaching, reviewing, and clerking in a bookshop. In 1934 he published Burmese Days. The plot of this novel concerns personal intrigue (plotting) among an isolated group of Europeans in Burma (a country now known as Myanmar). Two more novels followed: A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). In the spring of 1936 Orwell moved to Wallington, Hertfordshire, and several months later married Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a teacher and journalist. The Left Book Club authorized Orwell to write an inquiry into the lives of the poor and unemployed. The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) included an essay on class and socialism (a social system in which the production of goods and distribution of wealth is controlled centrally). It marked Orwell's birth as a political writer, an identity that lasted for the rest of his life. Political commitments and essays In July 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out.

Orwell arrived in Barcelona, Spain, at the end of autumn and joined the militia (a group of citizens who serve in the armed forces of a country). Orwell was wounded in the middle of May 1937. During his recovery, George Orwell. Reproduced by permission of Archive Photos, Inc. the militia was declared illegal, and he fled into France in June. His experiences in Spain had made him into a revolutionary socialist, one who advocated change to a socialist form of society through rebellion of the people. After Orwell returned to England, he began writing Homage to Catalonia (1938), which describes his disappointment with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War. He then wished to return to India to write a book, but he became ill with tuberculosis (a serious disease of the lungs). He was treated in a hospital until late in the summer of 1938. He spent the following winter in Morocco, where he wrote Coming Up for Air (1939). After he returned to England, Orwell authored several of his best-known essays.

These include the essays on Dickens and on boys' weeklies and "Inside the Whale." After World War II (1939–1945; a war fought between the Axis: Italy, Germany, and Japan, and the Allies: England, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States) began, Orwell wanted to enlist. The army, however, rejected him as physically unfit. Later he served for a period in the home guard and as a fire watcher. The Orwells moved to London in May 1940. In early 1941 George Orwell began writing "London Letters" for Partisan Review, and in August he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a producer in the Indian section. He remained in this position until 1943. First masterpiece In 1943 Orwell's mother died; he left the BBC to become literary editor of the Tribune; and he began reviewing books on a more regular basis. By February 1944 Orwell had completed Animal Farm, but several publishers rejected it on political grounds. It finally appeared in August 1945.

This fable intends to enforce a useful truth, the failure of communism, through animals that speak and act like humans. Toward the end of World War II, Orwell traveled to France, Germany, and Austria as a reporter. His wife died in March 1945. The next year he settled on Jura off the coast of Scotland, with his youngest sister as his housekeeper. Crowning achievement Although Orwell's health was now steadily falling apart, he started work on Nineteen Eighty-four. Published in 1949, this book is an elaborate satire (a literary work that uncovers the corrupt morals of humans) on modern politics, foretelling a world in which humans are made less than human in a world where citizens are at the mercy of the state's absolute control. Orwell entered a London hospital in September 1949 and the next month married Sonia Brownell. He died in London on January 21, 1950. Orwell's work is strongly autobiographical (based on the events of his own life) and combines elements of his own middle-class experience with his desire to cause social reform. He was critical of intellectuals whose political viewpoints struck him as superficial.

His strong stand against communism (a system in which the government controls all businesses) resulted from his experience of its methods gained as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War. For More Information

Question: Which English novelist had an early career as a policeman in Burma?
Answer: George Orwell